One man, many languages

Last February, I visited Baghdadi restaurant in Colaba. In its heyday the place was a bustling joint. What I visited was a derelict place instead. Dereliction can be easily smelt from a reasonable distance.

The food was not great. However, the waiter was very interesting. A very old visibly shaken person but highly spirited, he walks gingerly towards us.

I was yet to discover that he was quite a talker too. A young man doing that would have been really judged as a show-off but my bias towards oldies would categorise him as more of a performer.

I quickly found without being asked that he was from Kasaragod, the northern most district of Kerala. Kasaragod also has a personal connect. It is part of my native linguistic homeland called Tulu Nadu which extends from Karnataka’s central coastal district of Udupi to the northern strip of Kerala i.e. Kasaragod.

Since it caught my attention I asked him whether he spoke Tulu. He replied by uttering a line in Tulu. He spoke fluent Malayalam as well. He claimed to know Arabic (by his earlier work stay in KSA) but I am not particularly sure.

I recall a lot of Gulf-returned neighbours in Cheeta Camp, claiming fluency in Arabic only to find them not going beyond smattering a few sentences.

I am also not sure whether he is a Malayali or a Beary. Didn’t ask.

His multi-linguality however should not be surprising. If anything it is a natural aspect of our countrymen and yes even in the so-called Hindi belt where people would navigate between Bhojpuri or Maithili to Hindi and Bangla and a smattering of English here and there.

Languages correlate in a different manner, indeed.